People who think asking Claude to help write a PowerShell script is cheating have never spent four hours debugging a typo in a string comparison at midnight. The rubber duck method works. This is just a rubber duck that talks back.

Writing a PowerShell script for your own use and writing one that someone else has to maintain are not the same skill. I learned that distinction the hard way, on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at 200 lines of logic I wrote six months earlier that I could barely read myself.

If I could sit down with myself in 2020 and talk straight for an hour, most of it would be about what not to spend time on. Here’s the short version.

There’s a real difference between a script that automates something and a script that automated something once. One of them is infrastructure. The other is archaeology waiting to happen.

DDLs in Exchange look like they solve the membership problem automatically. They do. They just solve it on their own schedule, using logic you probably haven’t read in six months.

A comprehensive PowerShell health check script that monitors everything from CPU usage to AD replication, because finding out your DC is sick after users start complaining is nobody’s idea of fun.

Stop clicking through a dozen management consoles to figure out what’s happening with your domain controllers. This PowerShell script gathers everything that matters in one shot.